


hurt today, here tomorrow

by imgoingtocrash



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: A Dumb Sad World Where Tony Stark Dies, Angst, Flash Gets His Comeuppance, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Endgame, Precious Peter Parker, Recovering From Grief/Mourning, major character death (mentioned), sometimes you just have to be sad before you can move on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 16:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18210824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imgoingtocrash/pseuds/imgoingtocrash
Summary: “Peter doesn’t know what normal is, anymore. He’s tired of trying to continue after losing the important people in his life that made him feel permanent and stable—whose deaths make him anything but.He’s tired and the weight settled in his chest won’t dissipate, so he stops trying to move on altogether for a while.”Tony Stark dies after bringing everyone else on Earth back. Peter works through his grief by indulging it for a bit. Flash says the wrong thing and Peter reacts.





	hurt today, here tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> my brain: not to keep hurting peter parker but in a dumb sad world where tony stark dies in endgame, this little thing could happen, right?
> 
> Title from Let It Matter by Johnnyswim.

Peter returns to school three weeks later than everyone else.

After the reversal of Thanos’ snap—after Peter woke up on Titan with his enhanced senses on fire at the simple reaction of _being_ after so long, after looking around and realizing Mister Stark wasn’t there, after coming back to Earth to find out Tony Stark would no longer be anywhere at all ever again—the entire world seemed to need time to breathe. 

Something had happened, _that_ everyone seemed to know for sure, but there were few able to remember exactly what it was. Peter knows that Ned has his moments, just from how he looks at Peter sometimes: sad, relieved. Like he remembers that Peter was not there for so long, but now he is, so his brain is trying to put those misaligned puzzle pieces together.

 

(Just like Peter remembers not existing—remembers the something that nothing was—while still feeling like no time passed at all between when he was dissolving in Mister Stark’s arms to the moment he came back.)

 

By Monday morning, however, Midtown and every other school on Earth went back to business as usual. The news was talking about the fallen Avenger. Ned texted one hundred questions that Peter couldn’t bring himself to answer. May went to her late shift at the hospital, giving Peter a firm, long hug that told Peter she didn't really want to leave him there alone. 

 

(He doesn’t like to think about Aunt May turning to ash, but he doesn’t want to consider the alternative either. In the morning he’d woken up early for the field trip—by night he was dust on another planet, and she would have been all alone: no Peter, no Ben. The last of the Parkers on Earth.)

 

Peter doesn’t know what normal is, anymore. He’s tired of trying to continue after losing the important people in his life that made him feel permanent and stable—whose deaths make him anything but.

He’s tired and the weight settled in his chest won’t dissipate, so he stops trying to move on altogether for a while.

He cries until his eyes burn. Especially that first night, after meeting the Avengers, hearing the news, and breaking down at their feet in the living area of the Avengers compound like the child he is until Miss Potts had swiftly gathered him up with her warm hands and her own tear-stained cheeks and called Happy to take him home to Aunt May.

He sleeps too much.

He feels like he can never sleep enough.

He reads old text messages and ignores the new ones.

He thinks to go out as Spider-man and has a panic attack as soon as he puts the mask on— _the last time he wore the suit he was in space with Mister Stark, Tony Stark was alive, he can’t_ breathe—and Karen coaches him down. She’s the only one who listens to him cry in silence. She doesn’t comment on the overflow of aftershock emotion that has him begging his _AI_ of all things to bring Mister Stark back. _Please Karen, I’ll do anything, I’ll do everything Mister Stark says, I’ll never miss curfew, just—bring him back, please._

Karen plays old recordings of them screwing around in the labs instead: Peter babbling absently, Mister Stark watching with a raised eyebrow, a fond half-smile, and a guiding hand to catch Peter’s own when he gets too in his own head talking and stops paying attention to the welding instrument in his fingers.

It makes him feel about as much better as it makes him feel worse, which brings him back to the normal level of sadness that he’s becoming far too accustomed to, but can’t find the effort to change yet.

He realizes he has a funeral suit now—it’s a little tight from being years old, but he refuses any attempts from May to get him to let her buy him something else. She recognized the suit immediately from Ben’s funeral, and he can tell she hates that he’s wearing it to this one too.

Somewhere in his mind he decides he’s breaking it in—Ben Parker, Tony Stark—next it will be Aunt May, and maybe Ned and MJ will follow. Peter will be the last, because people keep dying around him, and he doesn’t seem to be next on the list, according to the universe. He might as well assume the suit will still fit when it’s his turn in the coffin. (The normal him, in a shining moment, breaking through, tells him that he’s being too dark, so he shoves that last thought deep into his mind and listens to the part of his brain not consumed by being sad all the time.)

 

It’s two weeks after the private funeral—filled with Miss Potts and Happy and Colonel Rhodes and the cluster of Avengers now all together, differences put aside for Tony or possibly because of the events that Tony led them through to end up here—that Aunt May pulls him from his blanket horde on the top bunk of his bed and tells him that the dead relative excuse has expired, and Peter has to go back to school.

He knows that she means well, because he did the same thing to her after Ben died. He made her start with getting dressed, and she went back to work. He went back to school. Life moved on.

Peter still doesn’t want to move on, but he doesn’t want May to worry about him so much, either. (Which he knows she is—she’s been a shoulder for Pepper to cry on, however that friendship happened, and he’s heard her nervous pacing and talking to the other woman on the phone through the walls.) 

He gets dressed. 

He eats a Pop-Tart and calls it taking care of himself. 

He goes to school the next morning, and then the next.

 

The routine helps, in some ways. Class is easy to get lost in. The math problems are theoretical. Science is steady and concrete. Shakespeare still doesn’t catch his interest in anything but the comedies.

Ned is the most helpful. He has a thousand questions on his tongue—no one but the original Avengers really seem to know how Tony died, and they’ve been tight-lipped to the press and the public—but Ned keeps them to himself after taking one look at the shape Peter’s in. Instead he gives Peter stacks of notes courtesy of MJ with a sticky note on top that tells him he’s not allowed to miss any more decathlon practices for the rest of the semester, and then Ned tells Peter to start replying to his texts already, please.

Ned lets Peter breathe, really, for the first time. At lunch he talks about the latest Star Wars book or about his baby sister’s sixth grade ‘relationship’, and he takes Peter’s new normal as it is. Peter’s quieter, he’s grieving, but he wants his life to go back to some semblance of what it was. Peter’s _trying_ for the first time in almost a month, and Ned seems to understand that it’s something to celebrate and encourage.

MJ friend-bullies him a little less, and Peter figures it’s her version of the same thing.

 

Peter’s been back at school for almost two whole weeks when Flash decides to take notice of Peter again. Maybe he remembers Peter being disappeared like everyone else before and gave him a break at first. Maybe he’s just having a crappy day today specifically. Flash was never one to need a reason to open his big mouth.

“You look like twice sun-baked shit, Parker,” Flash says, eloquent as ever, cornering Peter and Ned in the hallway.

“Okay,” Peter says, because he’s never been compared to feces before and isn’t quite sure how to respond. Also, a bonus to his less jubilant mood is that the little things aren’t as bothersome. Maybe Flash has just become another small thing he doesn’t care about anymore, which isn’t the worst thing ever.

“Seriously, look at him,” Flash says, turning to his peers, who are rarely actually impressed with Flash himself and more with the chaos and excitement to their days he tends to cause. “Acting like a grieving widow just because his little hero died! How pathetic.” Flash decides to emphasize his point by taking another step towards Peter. “We all know you didn’t know Stark, Penis. You’re just some freak obsessed with some dead douchebag—“

Peter shoves Flash.

Not a controlled shove, but an angry, power-fueled thing that ends up denting a set of lockers in the shape of a teenage boy. Peter walks forward, keeping Flash pinned against the lockers, blinded by rage.

“ _You_ didn’t know Mister Stark. He was so much— _better_ than anyone will ever know, and now he’s gone. He died for _you_. For me. He died for everyone on this planet. He died to give us another chance and you’re just—“

“Peter—“ Ned warns, hand on Peter’s arm. Peter shakes his friend off. He’s not done.

“Until _you’re_ the one holding Pepper Potts in your arms while she cries at her fiancé’s funeral, until _you_ watch earth’s mightiest heroes shed tears at Tony Stark’s graveside—you don’t get to tell me what I feel! I look at those stupid iron suits and all I want is for Tony to come back, but he can’t! He _won’t_!”

Peter may or may not be having a much-needed breakdown. Flash is either scared of Peter or believes he should go to the nearest mental health ward. Possibly both. 

Peter’s senses alert him to the approaching footsteps of campus security. Peter steps back.

“I don’t care what you believe about me, Flash—If Tony Stark’s name ever comes out of your mouth again with anything but complete respect for the man that he was, next time I’ll send you through the wall.” Peter knows he shouldn’t have given Flash the push that he did—he’s unsure if Flash could have accomplished the same with his normal human strength—but he makes the threat anyway, because if he can do anything for Tony now that he’s gone, it’s keeping Flash of all people from badmouthing him. 

Also, he has to admit it feels cathartic to address how much he misses Tony, he realizes. To try and make someone, even someone he dislikes, understand the way he’s felt inside since the moment he found out his mentor-friend-father-figure—neither of them ever really knew which, never had the time to address it with words—died while he was planets away and helpless to stop it.

The teacher who pulls Peter away in that moment—shocked because it’s Peter, probably, more than anything—has security escort him to the principal. Peter doesn’t fight back or make it hard. Flash started it, Peter ended it. He’s satisfied and coming down from the emotional high enough to realize it was a dumb move, even if it felt great in the moment.

The principal, unsure what to do with Peter’s unusually out of character outburst, calls Aunt May to take him home for the day and prepares him for the week of suspension and multiple weeks of detention the incident has awarded him.

On the way out of Principal Morita's office, though, he places a hand on Peter’s shoulder and says “I’m sorry for your loss.” 

Like he believes Peter was telling Flash the truth. 

Like he means it.

 

That night, Peter laughs full-bodied for the first time in weeks at a Midtown Memes Facebook page post that Ned sends him, wherein someone has thrown the audio of the original “yeet!" Vine over shitty cell phone footage of Peter sending Flash three feet into the lockers with a single push.

Peter has the thought that Mister Stark would hate it, and the past-tense of it doesn’t burn as much as it used to.

**Author's Note:**

> some people fling their high school bullies into a wall instead of going to therapy, what of it?
> 
> I’m scared of the idea of Endgame ending with any of the original Avengers dying, but I’ve been reading a lot of good Tony & Peter fic lately and felt this scene in my head had to happen, even if it’s short. I just felt like Peter’s been through a lot in his short life, and sometimes when bad stuff happens, we have to take it in to move on, but not swim in our sadness forever.
> 
> On a more positive note, maybe this will convince me to write some of the more fluffy ideas I’ve had?? Who knows, I’m doing another Star Wars exchange soon and I have an AU WIP that I stalled on to do too, but I’m also kind of loving being more heavily into Marvel stuff again for the first time in a few years.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Be it for the angst or just the slightly petty enjoyment of Flash getting shoved by Peter, I hope you enjoyed it. Comments, kudos, etc. are always appreciated, and [I love a kind Tumblr message too.](http://www.imgoingtocrash.tumblr.com)


End file.
